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BYTES TO BITSY: Peru-born Sandra Higueras had a dream job with Microsoft in 2001. The Seattle-based giant had just bought her employer, NCompass Labs, the Vancouver-based web-content-management firm, and she continued as a software designer, developer and analyst. She gained enormous respect for founder Bill Gates, admired other employees’ never-stop-working style as they were urged to excel, valued her high paycheques, and relished the challenges to her brain and intelligence.

“But Microsoft is a lifestyle, and I just wanted a job,” she said recently at Langley-based VSP Consulting Inc., which she helped found in 2008. Family firm? You bet. Father and longtime industrial-automation specialist Edgar Higueras coined the VSP name for wife Violeta and daughters Sandra and Pamela. Vice-president and IT manager Sandra designs software to maximize communications between management and floor staff at plants in the dairy, food-and-beverage, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and biotech sectors for which VSP designs and furnishes automated systems. As at Microsoft, though, she wants more. Back then it was to own a clothing line, be an accomplished actor, start a charity, travel the world, host a travel TV show, produce and direct a feature and documentary film, and learn to play drums.

Several aims have been realized. As for the clothing, her Qispi Kay swimwear made a splash at its 2010 launch in Peru. Marketed online and via some boutiques, Qispi Kay — it means “liberty” in the Chechua tongue — is handmade in Lima’s Gamarra garment district from South American Lycra, linings and accessories. “If I put my name on something, I want quality; I want it to last,” she said of her $120-to-$150 two-pieces.

Former kick-boxer and self-described “curvy girl,” Higueras was modelling in Peru and working her VSP day job remotely when the success of Surrey sisters Christina and Teresa Le’s Jaide Clothing enterprise made her ask: “If they can do it, why can’t I?”

She almost couldn’t, especially when a supplier reportedly double-crossed her and she was forced to repurchase her own patterns. North American friends then deemed her 2011 line “too small.”

Still, “After they tried them, they couldn’t go back to what I call big-bum bikinis,” Higueras said. Her 2012 line sold out rapidly online, and she’ll launch the 2013s at Vancouver Fashion Week on Sept. 21.

“I’m trying to portray my idea of the ideal woman,” said Higueras. Some might consider that to be a full-time software engineer realizing entrepreneurial, humanitarian and esthetic aims one by one.

HALF A LIFETIME: Let’s guess Jim Pattison will be worth $6 billion on his 84th birthday Oct. 1. That’s some uptick from 1971, when, after a long look through his office window, he said to administrative assistant Maureen Chant: “Ten years in business, and my net worth is now minus $2 million.”

By then, Pattison was halfway through three years when “we were really out of business. We were alive, but that was it.” The fiscal guillotine had fallen, “with no inkling whatsoever,” at 10 minutes to six, Dec. 23, 1969. With his Neonex firm’s takeover bid for Maple Leaf Mills foundering, the CIBC called in $73-million worth of personal and corporate loans.

The TD Bank kept him above water with a $2-million loan to cover payroll, and Neonex reported a $3-million profit on 1971 sales of $146 million. By April 1972, Pattison was chipper again. Interviewed then, he had returned to the acquisition trail, concentrating on areas where he’d made money before and, despite Income Tax Act impediments, would again: communications, consumer goods, food, leisure products and shelter. “Discretionary spending is simply the highest growth area right now,” he said. “It’s the best place to be.”

Now, with the $6.7-billion-a-year Jim Pattison Group a private company, he’ll do some discretionary spending of his own Monday. That’s when his alternative-adult PEAK station will hand its stereo transmitter, backup transmitter, 100.5 FM frequency and other cash and kind benefits totalling $1.5 million to hitherto-mono Vancouver Cooperative Radio. In return, the PEAK will get 1974-founded Coop Radio’s 102.7 FM frequency and thereby a technical leg-up to compete with other Vancouver FM stations.

Seeing a photo of three-piece-suited Pattison taken in 1972, continuing gatekeeper Chant said: “Looks like he’s at or getting ready to go to an AGM during the time we were a public company.” No need for that since it was privatized on Nov. 1, 1977, after which Pattison never looked back.

ROSEMARY’S BAGEL: “As you go through life, make this your goal: Watch the doughnut, not the hole.” Change one word of the Burl Ives song, and it could have been Parise Siegel’s watchword since 1990.

That’s when father Joel opened the Montreal-style Siegel’s Bagels concern that now produces one million of the boiled-and-baked confections yearly. Parise, who has managed the firm since 2006, sees that number expanding more than a hundred-fold. That would be via a new concern called Rosemary Rocksalt Ltd., named for a favourite flavour among the 21 bagel types she offers.

Siegel, Ken Sim and minority shareholders — she sent them cards saying, “Thanks for the dough” — incorporated Rosemary Rocksalt in May. The 300 outlets they plan for 2025 would be corporately owned, not franchised, Sim said.

Each would produce bagels in versions of the brick oven for which Joel Siegel originally chopped wood (it now burns mill ends).

Former London-based investment banker Sim has played the growth game before. In 2001, he and John DeHart founded Nurse Next Door Professional Homecare Service Inc. that now has 60 outlets, 57 of them franchised.

Almost next door to Siegel’s Bagel’s Cornwall-at-Cypress locale is a classic example of growth. It’s a Starbucks café, one of 12,000 in North America and almost 17,000 worldwide. Immediately next door is the Body Rays tanning salon, owned by former Playboy model Sonja Banman. More modestly, and before graduating from then-Capilano College as a business computer programmer, Siegel represented Canada at the Miss North America Teen pageant in Orlando, Fla. The bagel business lassoed her, though, and she began rising at 4 a.m. to make deliveries. Still does, although for recreational bike rides: “I like to see the bakery trucks on the road.”

Not Rosemary Rocksalt trucks, though. Its bagels should soon be made in situ on North Vancouver’s Lonsdale Ave. shopping strip, with a half-dozen Greater Vancouver outlets to follow. Guitar-and-singing student Sim, who is focusing on three songs, may make his performing debut at the first opening. Let’s bet he chooses Barney Bentall’s Something To Live For or the Tragically Hip’s Wheat Kings rather than GranFondo teammate and Blue Rodeo singer Jim Cuddy’s Bad Timing.

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Trade Talk: Software engineer turns bytes into bikinis

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